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Slightly Foxed Issue 49
    • ISBN: 9781906562861
    • Pages: 96
    • Dimensions: 210 x 148mm
    • Illustrations: B/W
    • Publication date: 1 March 2016
    • Producer: Smith Settle
    • Cover artist: Rosie Sanders, ‘Dandelions and other flowers’
    • Back cover fox by: Anna Trench
    • ISSN: 1742-5794
    Made in Britain

    Slightly Foxed Issue 49

    ‘Murder at the Majestic’

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    The independent-minded quarterly that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine.

    In this issue

    Robert Macfarlane disappears into his dictionaries • Margaret Drabble follows James Joyce to Trieste • Jonathan Smith goes back to school with Brian Moore • Sue Gee meets Penelope Fitzgerald’s uncles • Oliver Pritchett seeks inspiration • Sarah Bakewell takes to the autoroute with Cortázar and Dunlop • Patrick Welland recalls the end of empire with J. G. Farrell • Helena Drysdale meets some Real PeopleA. F. Harrold returns to Slaughterhouse 5Linda Leatherbarrow smells Bad Blood . . .


    Murder at the Majestic • PATRICK WELLAND

    J. G. Farrell, Troubles

    Evasions and Deceits • PETER PARKER

    Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley

    All for Art • HELENA DRYSDALE

    Alison Lurie, Real People

    Joyce to the Life • MARGARET DRABBLE

    Richard Ellmann, James Joyce

    Birch, Bell and Book • JONATHAN SMITH

    Brian Moore, The Feast of Lupercal

    The Spell of Stout Angus • ROBERT MACFARLANE

    James Stout Angus, A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect

    Learning from the Wilderness • GALEN O’HANLON

    Ronald Welch, Mohawk Valley

    Motorway Madness • SARAH BAKEWELL

    Cortázar & Dunlop, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

    Wisdom from the Ivory Tower • MATTHEW ADAMS

    F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica

    Dresden and After • A. F. HARROLD

    Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5

    A Victorian Quartet • SUE GEE

    Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers

    The Sadness of Mrs Bridge • WILLIAM PALMER

    Evan S. Connell, Mrs Bridge

    Lost Cities • CHARLES ELLIOTT

    John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America

    London at War • JULIET GARDINER

    Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War

    Old Devil in a Dog-collar • LINDA LEATHERBARROW

    Lorna Sage, Bad Blood

    Getting the Idea • OLIVER PRITCHETT

    On Inspiration


    About Slightly Foxed

    The independent-minded quarterly that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine. Read more about Slightly Foxed.

    ‘It's a joy, a delight, a quarterly treat that drives me to the bookshelves, the bookshop or the library in search of forgotten or never-encountered pleasures. I won't say that Slightly Foxed is essential, it's just that I can't live without it any more.’ Bernard Cornwell



    Slightly Foxed Issue 49: From the Editors

    As everyone who lives here knows, spring in London doesn’t just signal daffodils in window boxes and budding trees in squares. It signals building projects. The whole city seems to be in a state of...

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    Heylor, Shetland

    Robert Macfarlane delights in dialect and explores the landscape of language in Slightly Foxed Issue 49, accompanied by Claire Dalby’s woodcut of Heylor, Shetland.

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    Her name was Muriel Haidée Perry . . .

    Her name was Muriel Haidée Perry and she was born on 5 March 1890, or so I believed when I went to Somerset House to look up the registration of her birth. It wasn’t there. What I was really...

    Read more

    The Spell of Stout Angus

    In a poem written near the end of his life, W. S. Graham imagined himself as a ‘wordy ghost’, ‘floating across the frozen tundra / of the lexicon and the dictionary’. Like Graham – like...

    Read more

    June News: The Word-Hoard – Love Letters to Our Land

    At this time of year, the build-up of desket syndrome at SF HQ is increasingly problematic, and the prospect of escaping the city for a dose of the natural world becomes more appealing by the day....

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    Evasions and Deceits

    Among the small horde of papers Diana Petre left me as her literary executor when she died in 2001 was a folder labelled: ‘Excuses. Lies. Evasions. Deceits.’ I thought at first that it might...

    Read more

    Slightly Foxed Issue 49: From the Editors

    As everyone who lives here knows, spring in London doesn’t just signal daffodils in window boxes and budding trees in squares. It signals building projects. The whole city seems to be in a state of...

    Read more

    The Sadness of Mrs Bridge

    As a fan of early jazz, I’ve read a great deal about Kansas City as it was in the 1930s. A most attractive place it seems in retrospect, of twenty-four-hour drinking and gambling, to the...

    Read more

    Murder at the Majestic

    On 11 August 1979, a humane and singular man, who after long periods punctuated by adversity declared himself ‘happier than I’ve been in years’, left his isolated cottage near Bantry Bay in the...

    Read more

    All for Art

    What a perfect basis for a novel: hole up some highly charged ‘creatives’ in a secluded location and propel them from Eden into a Sartrean existentialist hell. Published in 1969, Real People is a...

    Read more

    Joyce to the Life

    I have the clearest recollection of my first reading of Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce. I have just reread it, from cover to cover and from footnote to footnote, for the second time. And, at...

    Read more

    Learning from the Wilderness

    You should never camp in a ravine. Look for higher ground, and a windbreak – a fallen tree is fine, but rocks are the best. Gather balsam wood for bedding, and use your tomahawk to cut firewood...

    Read more

    Birch, Bell and Book

    Brian (pronounced Bree-an) Moore started his life in Belfast in 1921 and ended it in Malibu, California, in 1999, and that journey – and all that it implies – is the central thread of his...

    Read more

    Wisdom from the Ivory Tower

    The title, which translates as ‘A Study of a Tiny Academic World’, refers to the enclave that was Cambridge University in the 1900s, at which time Cornford was a fellow of classics at Trinity...

    Read more

    Dresden and After

    Just as I was about to sit down to write this I heard an edition of Radio 4’s A Good Read in which the comedian and writer Richard Herring chose Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), the book I had planned to...

    Read more

    Motorway Madness

    As with many of the books I’ve come to love most, I bought Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1983) impulsively, knowing nothing about it, and mainly because of its cover. This features a doughty old red...

    Read more

    A Victorian Quartet

    Last spring, I visited the hamlet of Knill, deep in the Herefordshire countryside. Knill lies on the river Lug, a tributary of the Wye, and in the 1930s Penelope Fitzgerald’s father, Eddie Knox,...

    Read more

    Lost Cities

    Between 1839 and 1841 John Lloyd Stephens made two long and arduous trips through Central America in search of lost Mayan cities. What followed were two huge books (respectively 900 and 700 pages...

    Read more

    London at War

    Year by year literature of and about the First World War mounts –  books on its campaigns, causes, politics and economics; memoirs by politicians and generals; diaries and letters written by...

    Read more

    Old Devil in a Dog-collar

    I first read Lorna Sage’s deeply absorbing and funny memoir Bad Blood in 2001, just before it won the Whitbread Award for Biography. A week later she died of emphysema, aged only 57, and, although...

    Read more

    Getting the Idea

    I wonder what the business was that the person from Porlock wanted to discuss when he (or possibly she) knocked on the door of the isolated farmhouse in Nether Stowey on that day in the summer of...

    Read more

    Comments & Reviews

    Leave your review

    1. Chris Stewart says:

      A wonderful literary magazine, a real little gem.

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